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In theory, Islam is a religion without a clergy. On the ground, things look different. Before Patrick Gaffney decided to pay attention to Islamic sermons in the late 1970s, no comprehensive study of contemporary Islamic preachers existed. He spent hundreds of hours in mosques in Egypt, recording and analyzing what he heard. His curiosity was ahead of the curve. A couple of years into his study, Islamic preachers ceased to be viewed as irrelevant. Today, Gaffney is your man if you want to make sense of what's being said at mosques worldwide.
A polyglot, Catholic priest, and chair of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame, Gaffney found that modern Islamic preaching represents variations on three ideal types, based on the kind of knowledge from which the preacher derives his authority—hence preacher as saint, preacher as scholar, and preacher as warrior. This typology structures Gaffney's book, The Prophet's Pulpit: Islamic Preaching in Contemporary Egypt (Univ. of California Press, 1994), which includes a sample sermon of each type. He is also coauthor of Breaking Cycles of Violence: Conflict Prevention in Interstate Crises (Kumarian, 1999).
In November, the animated and witty redhead described to Agnieszka Tennant—with abundant hand gestures and with words—the power that resides in the Islamic preacher's pulpit.
What sparked your interest in Islamic preachers?
The center of my interest was authority. I wanted to study why some religious traditions and social institutions carry weight and some don't. With the help of a professor at the University of Chicago who had studied Arab politics in Jordan, I came to realize that authority in the Islamic world was a topic virtually invisible in the literature. Before I went to Egypt to study it, I read virtually everything I could find, and it was much easier to find information about preaching in the twelfth century than preaching in the twentieth century. I thought, What's going on here? Preaching is being heard in mosques all over the Middle East, and I'm trying to find out about it by reading what scholars and reporters have written, and there's virtually nothing there.
If you talk with Muslims, they'll tell you that Islam rejects the whole notion of clergy. Their self-understanding doesn't allow them to think that way. But institutionally they give people titles and cell phones, and those people function like clergy. To some extent we have this in the Christian tradition, too. Many Christian groups are very suspicious of clerical authority. The Presbyterians rejected bishops and so on. Yet to an outsider, it might appear that the groups which have rejected clerical authority have simply reinvented it in other forms. Obviously the analogy is not perfect, but it may help to understand how Muslims can claim that they have no clergy.
What kind of authority do Islamic preachers hold?
To some degree that depends on the source of their authority. Is it spiritual power, wonder-working power of the kind associated with saints? Is it ethical teaching based on a mastery of the texts of Islamic tradition? Or is it the calling of a holy warrior? These are ideal types, and they may overlap. And all of them trace their authority to the time of the Prophet and his immediate successors. Muhammad was the civil leader, the political leader, and of course the one who spoke for God. So in the Islamic world, political and religious authority are ideally embodied in the same person.
Over the centuries, as the Islamic imperium began to fragment, political and religious authority were frequently divided. Religious authority was assumed by the community of preacher-scholars. They established networks to train their own people. Mosque universities arose to prepare religious scholars, who became officials in a widespread quasi-bureaucracy where their common training in Islamic law enabled them to speak for the tradition.
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